The Supreme Court green-lights verifying American citizenship for voting, fraud, fraud, and more fraud, Trump gets Greenland without having to buy it, Cruz looks at EPIC City terrorism ties, the Clancy holdout juror speaks, some horrifying child abuse cases, and completely different horrifying murder house, and a surprising amount of Norm Macdonald.
The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 said the Trump administration can use an updated immigration database to verify the citizenship of voters.
A majority of justices agreed to stay pending the outcome of an appeal of a June order from a federal judge that barred the use of a revamped database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had found that federal officials were violating the privacy rights of American citizens by disclosing the citizenship status and Social Security numbers, among other data, in the restructured database. She vacated the 2025 update, which connected Social Security information to the system.
A federal appeals court later upheld the decision.
Trump administration officials then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing in a Sept. 8 brief that the order “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”
Six justices sided with the administration. In a per curiam opinion, they said that claims from the organizations that sued over the updated database “likely lack merit,” including the allegation that federal officials are violating federal laws, because Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive citizenship information and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration, in a 1996 statute called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.
The majority also said that keeping in place the prohibition “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies.”
States regularly use the system. Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden recently said the state in the fall of 2025 ran the names of its 18 million registered voters through the database and identified 2,724 people who may be noncitizens.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
“USDA Targets 170 NYC Retailers in SNAP Fraud Sweep. ‘SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,’ White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said.”
The Trump administration has stopped more than $5.8 billion in SNAP fraud since taking office, and its latest sweep just hit New York City, where hundreds of undercover investigations led to enforcement action against 170 retailers across all five boroughs.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced “Operation SNAP Back” on Friday as part of a broader push against retailer fraud in the nearly $100 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“This is just the latest action in the Trump Administration’s fight against fraud. The message is clear, if you accept any portion of an annual $100 billion taxpayer program, you must follow the rules or face the consequences,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. “We owe it to every American taxpayer to safeguard their hard-earned dollars, and these latest enforcement actions are just a small part of the Food and Nutrition Administration’s efforts to remove criminals and bad actors from food stamps.”
The cases involve SNAP trafficking, where benefits are exchanged for cash, along with retailers accused of allowing benefits to be used for alcohol and other ineligible non-food items. USDA says penalties can range from temporary suspension to permanent disqualification and monetary fines. Several cases were also referred to the USDA Office of Inspector General for possible criminal investigation and prosecution.
Investigators used undercover purchases at stores suspected of violating SNAP rules. Some retailers were caught exchanging benefits for cash, while others allegedly processed transactions for prohibited products.
“SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,” White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said. “And thanks to Secretary Rollins, such waste and abuse will stop.”
Here’s your reminder that the fraud is still continuing – boldly, even! – after months of nonstop reporting about it.
Katie Daviscourt of the Post Millennial did some looking into Somali-run daycares in the Seattle area, many of which receive tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars monthly, and you’ll never guess what she found.
Most showed no signs of kids.
Many neighbors say they’ve never seen anything that looks like a daycare in the area!
These families get together, watch each other’s kids sometimes, incorporate as a “daycare,” and collect tens of thousands a month.
Here’s the PM:
In total, Daviscourt reported that in just two neighborhoods there were over $5 million in potential abuses of taxpayer funds, and they had gone to over 20 locations reporting to be daycare locations. Under Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program, daycares can request government funding in order to back their businesses when they are caring for low-to-middle-income families.
Vice President JD Vance and the White House’s anti-fraud task force canceled Affordable Care Act policies covering more than 760,000 people, the administration announced Tuesday, citing suspected improper and fraudulent enrollments.
The task force, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates the move will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.
Following the cancellation of 315,000 enrollments, the vice president said officials are going to conduct “additional verification” on about 419,000 more enrollees, whom they suspect may be improperly enrolled or ineligible for the program. Similarly, the Trump administration is banning some insurance brokers who are thought to be complicit in the fraudulent enrollment.
“We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”
Snip.
“This is what the fraud task force is all about,” the vice president said, alongside CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and other senior administration officials at Tuesday’s press conference. “Saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are not victim to waste and fraud.
Oz noted that CMS has issued termination notices to hundreds of brokers, including 469 in late August, and has placed a moratorium on new agents and brokers while officials investigate the eligibility of the additional 419,000 enrollees.
“There will be no new brokers for Obamacare in this country for the next six months, and we do not feel at all conflicted about that decision, because most of the fraud, a disproportionate amount of the fraud, is taking place from these individuals,” Oz said.
The ACA — colloquially known as Obamacare — was passed in 2010 under former President Barack Obama.
And its baleful effects on health care and the federal budget live on…
California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.
In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.
We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.
Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.
“If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”
In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.
“If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”
These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.
State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”
Snip.
Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.
Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.
California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.
Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.
This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.
California shows no sign of paring back this largesse. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill into law that extended taxpayer-funded food benefits to illegal low-income residents. Beginning next October, qualified Californians 55 and older will become eligible for that program, regardless of immigration status. California’s Legislative Analyst estimates that it could cost up to an additional $400 million a year.
Is there any doubt that California Democrats love illegal aliens far more than citizens? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
California Democrats pulled up the ladder to prevent the likes of Nick Shirley and local reporters like JJ Smith, Amy Reichert, and many others from finding out where millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were fraudulently spent.
In my story, Karen Bass Feels Heat From Feds Over Millions in Stolen and Laundered ‘Homeless’ Funds, we learned that Bill Essayli, who’s supposed to be the U.S. attorney in Central California (LA area) but isn’t because John Thune can’t do his job, this week announced the arrests and indictments of four individuals who had stolen millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars. They were supposed to house and help the homeless, but they helped themselves instead.
After the indictments were announced and after the U.S. House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Authority operators to please come to Washington to have a little chat — under oath — the homeless authority announced it no longer wanted to receive federal funding and, in fact, plans to get out of the homeless business entirely.
Bass and the people in Los Angeles who have run this agency into the ground after bilking taxpayers for years are getting out of the homeless business.
The California Post reports, “LAHSA will not seek to retain responsibility for the annual application for federal homelessness funding, the Homeless Management Information System, the annual point-in-time count or the coordinated-entry system.”
The same federal funding that came from your pockets and mine. The same federal funding lost after these alleged California homeless advocates threw piles of cash in front of an industrial fan and pointed it in the general direction of people who deserve to be in prison.
Follow-up: “Satellite imagery shows significant damage to Moscow Oil Refinery after Ukraine’s drone strike yesterday. Multiple strikes are recorded and oil tanks confirmed destroyed. Additionally, a Pantsir booster intercepted a car.”
“Big JDAM Air Strike on Troop Concentration in Bilytske, Donetsk.” Early in the war, Ukraine couldn’t have carried out a JDAM strike, due to fears of Russian aircraft and SAM batteries, indicating serious Ukrainian degradation of those categories of Russian weapons.
More winning: “Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up.”
Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity. This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it’s the most utility shutdown events in the country’s recent history.
Even when Cuba’s grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time. Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff.
“Protocols are now in place to begin the gradual restoration of the system,” said Felix Estrada, an official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of the city remained completely dark.
Many exhausted residents of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.
“Yesterday I’d gone without power for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.
Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.
The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.
The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.
A linked story suggests it’s the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Greg Gutfeld is rightly upset that Austin’s commie twerp of a U.S. rep is more upset at an illegal alien getting shot than the murder of Andrew Wimsatt, an American citizen he theoretically represented.
On Labor Day a man, Andrew Wimsatt, was viciously murdered in an Austin Park – in an attempted beheading. This creep didn’t give two shits about it.
We often hear leftists accuse billionaires of buying government, and most times the accusations are at least partly off-base.
But not always, and sometimes they are literally doing precisely that: putting privately funded leftists into government offices to run a parallel government that nobody ever voted for. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.
One such program, funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, placed and paid the salaries of “government employees” strategically inserted into Attorney General offices in Blue states, funding regulations and lawsuits aimed at targets that Bloomberg’s NYU-based NGO program identified as vulnerable to its pressure. The goal was, of course, fighting climate change.
BREAKING: Bloomberg-Backed Climate Group Paying Salaries of Democratic State AG Officials Quietly Shuts Down Amid Congressional, Legal Scrutiny.
“A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.”
Think of it as a cousin to “Zuckerbucks,” where a private entity funds a program that places people in government offices as either quasi- or fully government employees, with a mandate to pursue the NGO’s agenda. The same sort of thing happens with grants to news organizations, where an outside group pays for employees or “coverage” of specific issues, and the stories are still technically the product of the news organization, but the content is directed at producing the results desired by the people who cut the checks.
Snip.
Bloomberg, cut a big check to NYU, which in turn established a program to place its people directly into the offices of State Attorneys General, where they proceeded to sue and harass businesses targeted by the organization.
James Comer opened an investigation into the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, and out of the blue, it closed. He sought documents from it, and “poof!” It’s gone.
In my view, Angela Merkel bears a grave responsibility for the collapse of the centre and the growing ability of the political extremes to set the agenda.
The almost one-third of voters who would support Alternative für Deutschland in a national election are not fascists or Nazis. A substantial proportion are disillusioned CDU voters.
What has disappointed these voters? First, what I see as Merkel’s failures on so many fronts: immigration. Security. Energy. A sustainable strategy for business and economic growth. Digitalisation. Infrastructure maintenance. The list is almost endless.
Second, the extraordinary denial of reality that, in my assessment, Merkel allowed to take hold when it came to immigrants’ responsibility for antisemitism, violence against women, terrorism and gang crime.
Coming from Denmark, where we have reliable statistics on all these matters, I find it frankly shocking to listen to the nonsense coming from Germany’s political elite.
But I would also trace back to Merkel the rise of what is often called “Islamo-leftism” – a tendency that has recently gained ground in Sweden and is also growing in Germany. In Sweden, polls have indicated that 85 per cent of Muslim voters support parties to the left of centre, with almost one in five supporting the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet – a party tainted by antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism. I see no compelling reason to assume that the pattern in Germany is fundamentally different.
My argument, then, is that it is not only the rise in support for the AfD that can be traced back to Merkel. The same applies to the growing support for parties on the German left that promote the political and religious views of a significant proportion of the people, Merkel invited to Germany. Not least on the Gaza question.
Both Democrats and the international left has derided President Trump’s focus on Greenland, saying the U.S. controlling it was a fantasy. Now that he’s signed an agreement with Denmark, I doubt they’re laughing now.
The US-Greenland-Denmark agreement has now been published. I haven’t read it, but Arnaud Bertrand has. This is his analysis of the terms, which appear very favorable to the United States, and well calculated to achieve the goal of preventing undue influence over the Arctic by any hostile power.
Snip.
To sum up:
– The US secured a permanent military foothold that even an independent Greenland would inherit whether it likes it or not
– The US now has veto power over any non-NATO military presence in Greenland, and over who can invest in its strategic infrastructure and resources (beyond NATO and the EU)
– Denmark signed away its say over the principle of new US bases, with only the right to discuss the “implementation details”
– Danish authorities no longer set the rules for US military movement across the island
– And all of it is now justified by the defense of “the American continent”
Lindsay Clancy holdout juror Michael P. Desronvil speaks out.
Michael is a Catholic from a Haitian immigrant family and moved to Massachusetts when he was a young child.
The liberal women who so badly want to destroy him for refusing to acquit a child killer do not know how to handle that. Their woke brains simply cannot compute how to proceed.
Several jurors who wanted to let Clancy off the hook have claimed that Michael did not follow the jury instructions, but they have incriminated themselves with statements indicating they had an ideological agenda in the courtroom. Michael says he “kept getting cut off” by these other jurors, who apparently knew his own thoughts better than him.
This lines up with a statement from a fourth juror who says she was ultimately badgered into changing her vote.”
A female 4th juror comes forward and says the other jurors were pushing to acquit on *DAY 1*
In fact, a whole lot of basic jury procedures seem to have been discarded in the Clancy trial. “Lindsay Clancy jurors broke cardinal rule and used phones to RESEARCH killer mom during deliberations, holdout claims.”
“Feds arrest, indict hundreds in Trump voter fraud crackdown: ‘Catching it all over the country.’ The Justice Department says its crackdown on noncitizen voting and election fraud has already produced more than 200 arrests and indictments, with that number possibly doubling soon and state election officials themselves now facing potential charges for looking the other way.”
Since the Trump Justice Department warned state and local election officials that they could be charged with allowing fraudulent voting activities, more than 200 arrests and indictments have been secured in a crackdown on election fraud and noncitizen voting, and that number could double soon, a top official revealed to Just the News.
“I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they’ve been looking the other way when this is happening, and we’re catching it all over the country,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Monday night in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.
Dhillon also hinted at further developments in the coming weeks, suggesting her department has developed evidence calling into question New Jersey’s claim that a computer glitch allowed thousands of foreigners to register to vote in that state and about 400 to actually cast ballots in violation of law.
“I’m not sure we have the correct numbers from New Jersey. They’re not really cooperating with us, and so we will get to the bottom of what happened there. And you know, New Jersey tried to blame a vendor for a mistake or a glitch, quote unquote. But you know, I think there’ll be another side to that story,” she said.
Snip.
Over the weekend, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that his agency is investigating 1,620 cases of voter fraud involving noncitizens and has made 151 arrests. He said his department is also looking into an additional 300,000 cases based on states’ voter rolls.
That thing that never happens keeps happening. “DOJ Charges 16 Noncitizens in Voter Fraud Cases.”
Howard Dean speaks to the ChiComs: “DNC Chairman Emeritus Howard Dean delivered the American welcome address at a China dialogue involving the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank identified in congressional commission testimony as ‘run by Chinese intelligence.’ The Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, which co-organized the event, has an equally explicit allegiance. Its charter says it: ‘upholds the comprehensive leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Ties between the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the proposed EPIC City development in North Texas came under scrutiny during a recent U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing chaired by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
EPIC City, which has been criticized as an Islamic enclave and housing development exclusive to Muslims, is a proposal from the East Plano Islamic Center.
The Wednesday hearing of the subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.”
Sen. Cruz addressed the fact that Democrat senators failed to attend the meeting, stating that “their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America.”
Cruz heard from witnesses that alleged ties between CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and EPIC City.
Arielle F. Klepach, senior litigation counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center, called attention to the connection in her written testimony.
She likened the EPIC City development, later rebranded as “The Meadow” following significant backlash, to a pattern of “mega-mosque” building projects in Europe commonly motivated by “Islamist separatism.”
This movement is a “deliberate attempt to cut Muslim communities off spiritually, intellectually, and culturally from the surrounding secular society,” with the building projects in particular “generally [containing] community-like features such as schools, libraries, and gyms,” according to Klepach.
“The American version of this pattern is EPIC City,” Klepach said. “CAIR-Texas and CAIR-DFW have publicly defended EPIC City in the disputes, and CAIR’s national leadership has spoken at the EPIC mosque, reflecting an active advocacy relationship between CAIR and the EPIC religious community.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was designated a foreign terrorist organization by Gov. Greg Abbott late last year, along with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The hearing also revisited CAIR’s role as an unindicted co-conspirator to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). The foundation and five of its officials were convicted of “funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas” during a 2008 federal trial. CAIR was not charged in the case.
Lara Burns, senior research fellow for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, drew the connection between CAIR and Hamas in her written testimony.
“The United States Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee served as the original Hamas infrastructure in the United States, initially consisting of the HLF (the fundraising arm),” alongside others, according to Burns.
“At the [2008] trial, still today the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in American history, [various arms of the Muslim Brotherhood] were identified as unindicted co-conspirators/joint ventures as was [CAIR],” she added.
A father-and-son serial killer house of horror found in Pennsylvania.
A Pennsylvania father and son have come under suspicion after the son was discovered to be traveling with a woman with a fake ID that used the name of a missing woman.
Police searched the home of the man and his dad and found the most disturbing scene imaginable.
he investigation is still unfolding but this is some seriously unsettling stuff going on.
Here’s the latest from ABC 6 in Philly on the now 7 missing women connected to this case against Eugene Horsch and his deceased father RC:
Blair Tonzelli was 35 years old when she went missing in 2023. She was the first woman named in this case.
Police say when Horsch was arrested, he was with a woman in possession of an identification card with Tonzelli’s name on it. The woman allegedly told police Eugene Horsch gave her the ID.
Amy McHale was 44 years old when she was last seen in 2016. Shortly after news broke of Horsch’s arrest, her family told Action she was last seen at the W. Chew Avenue house.
McHale had previously been married to Ray Horsch, who has also become a central figure in this case.
Gabrielle Amarando was 22 years old when she disappeared in 2012.
A childhood friend of Amarando told Action News that loved ones grew increasingly concerned when they stopped hearing from her…
Roughly 14 years later, her family got the confirmation they were looking for.
In August, police said the women were seen in photos and videos recovered during the investigation, in which both are seen alive and then later appearing to be dead.
‘Based on the video and photo evidence — if the images in the video are real and not altered in any way, based on their review — the M.E. would believe the individuals depicted in the images are deceased,’ Philadelphia Police Inspector Ray Evers.
Maribel Fresses was the other woman seen in the videos and photos. She [was] 27 when she disappeared in 2018.
Police also saw photos and videos of two other unidentified women, both alive and then dead, as well as video of the elder Horsch strangling a woman to death.
Five urns believed to have the unidentified remains of five women were found in the home.
Millions of photos and videos have so far revealed that at least 7 women who went missing ultimately met their demise at the hands of the Horsches.
Shades of H. H. Holmes…
UK functionaries go out of their way to protect their precious illegal aliens. “British government mobilizes HUNDREDS of police and defense units to protect migrant boat from British protesters.”
Third World migrants are being led across the channel by French authorities, where British police then escort them into harbor, put them aboard taxpayer-funded coach buses, and give them a police escort with hundreds of officers.
Snip.
Earlier in the day, British protesters gathered by land and by sea to peacefully demonstrate against a group of 60 or so migrants that was set to land in southern England in Gosport.
Because of the protesters gathered along the coast, authorities had to scramble to find a new landing spot for the “newcomers.” The buses were seen with a massive police escort.
The reason for the escort was due to the fear that the British protesters would get “mostly peaceful” and attack the invaders or the masked bus drivers who are helping traffic them into the country:
One GB News reporter summed up the massive taxpayer expenditure that was spent to assist the migrants:
The whole thing from start to finish today, for this one boat of 60-odd or however many it turns out to be, to go all the way flanked by a massive French ship, then to our [Royal National Lifeboat Institution] boats, then all of those resources pumped into Gosport.
And THEN, it looks as though because of the local reaction, they’ve decided to not to that, take them down either to Eastport or Dover or somewhere else anyway.
So goodness knows what the resources are going to be like there.
We are talking MILLIONS of Pounds today alone, for a group of 60 illegal migrants.
Is there any doubt the Labour government prioritizes importing illegal aliens into the country over taking care of their own citizens?
Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment – have you heard about toddler fight club? A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other.
One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises. Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris. She insisted on seeing the classroom’s surveillance footage.
The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child.
I’m skipping right past the obvious “First Rule of Toddler Fight Club” joke to point out that if my (theoretical) kid were forced into that, both daycare and the employees would be facing both a huge civil lawsuit and criminal charges.
More horrifying child abuse: “Transgender ICU nurse arrested on multiple counts of abusing NICU baby at Michigan hospital.”
[Kieran Ansley], a now-former nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has been charged with child abuse after a 4-month-old girl in his [sic] care was found with multiple broken bones and bruising.
The injuries were noticed by the infant’s mother during an early morning visit in April, records show. Tests and a full skeletal survey found multiple fractures, including broken leg bones and multiple bruises, court records show. Bruising was found on the infant’s hands, arms, thigh, buttocks, abdomen and tongue, court records show.
‘The totality of the findings resulted in a diagnosis of pediatric physical abuse,’ court documents show.
More horrifying details snipped. Hell’s too good for him.
Dallas’ “Y’all Street” continues to capitalize on momentum as the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) enters a new era of growth.
North Texas has added a stock exchange alongside its iconic stockyards, and companies are beginning to flock to the TXSE’s transfer portal. TXSE opened in July, and September has seen the first corporate commitments and primary listing transfers.
On September 16, Texas Capital’s Texas Equity Index exchange-traded fund (ETF) and Texas Oil Index ETF became the TXSE’s first primary listings. The company’s CEO, President, and Chairman, Rob Holmes, rang the bell on “Y’all Street” to celebrate the company’s primary listing transfer. Texas Capital was formerly listed on the Nasdaq.
Holmes stated in a Bloomberg interview about the transfer, “Once this exchange came to fruition, it was our responsibility to look at the three exchanges and pick the best one for Texas Capital.”
He praised the TXSE’s investor base as an affirmation of the exchange’s technological and strategic innovation. The TXSE saw over $275 million in total investment, with major investors including BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Charles Schwab.
Competing securities exchanges include the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, both based in New York City.
Holmes asserted that TXSE’s net present value (NPV) is “better” than its New York rivals.
“On this exchange, instead of just paying a fee, we pay a fee, but at the end of the day we have a net cash position from the exchange,” he said.
If someone can explain what that last sentence means, please do so in the comments…
“Democrat candidate caught crying in the back of cop car after DUI arrest. Washington state Democratic House candidate Krista Perez was seen crying, praying and sobbing in the back of a patrol car after her DUI arrest.” Washington state has a jungle primary, with two Democratic candidates for House of Representatives District 29-Position 1 (the state has 49 districts of two reps each) facing each other in November, so Republicans won’t be able to take advantage here.
Jay Leno’s Law, exempting classic cars from California’s draconian emissions regulations, was signed into law in a rare act of sanity from Governor Hairgel. But note it doesn’t take effect until January 1, 2028.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces completed a new round of offensive strikes against Iran, July 7, hitting over 80 targets with precision munitions as an immediate response to Iran’s latest attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. forces struck Iranian air defense systems, command and control networks, coastal radar sites, anti-ship missile capabilities, and more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait to degrade Iran’s ability to continue attacking international commerce flowing through the international trade corridor.
Iran recently attacked three commercial vessels transiting the strait including Marshall Islands-flagged M/T Al Rekayyat, Saudi Arabia-flagged M/T Wedyan, and Liberian-flagged M/T Cyprus Prosperity. The unwarranted aggression by Iranian forces is a clear and dangerous violation of the ceasefire and undermines freedom of navigation.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces completed an additional round of strikes against Iran, July 8, to further degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping and innocent civilian mariners in the Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. forces struck approximately 90 Iranian military targets including air defense systems, coastal surveillance assets, missile and drone storage sites, naval capabilities, and military logistics infrastructure along Iran’s coastline. The latest strikes follow successful execution of offensive strikes in Iran the night before.
CENTCOM forces hit approximately 80 Iranian military targets July 7, including more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats, to impose heavy costs for Iran violating the ceasefire by attacking three commercial vessels navigating the Strait of Hormuz.
So it turns out I didn’t actually need to read the complete “Memorandum of Understanding” between the U.S. and Iran after all. Sometimes sloth is a great time saver.
During the “ceasefire” that was mostly fire and very little cease, a recurring pattern emerged: Iran would launch attacks on shipping, claiming all traffic needed to offer up danegeld for safe passage, all while asserting the most ludicrous series of lies about what the United States had agreed to. The U.S. was immediately going to unfreeze all Iranian assets. Iran would be allowed to charge ships for safe passage through the straits. Hamas and Hezbollah were free from all Israeli attacks. Etc.
So President Trump finally tired of these shenanigans and hit the unpause button, and now U.S. forces are pounding the snot out of Iran (again), while Iran launches missiles and drones at U.S. bases and other gulf states (again). Sure, Iran may be suffering from hyperinflation and it now takes some 1.3 million rials to buy a single dollar, but they always manages to produce enough missiles and drones to keep up the illusion of puissance, much like they they were able to fund their nuclear program and international terrorism for decades rather than meet their citizen’s basic needs.
Trump tends to view the world through the twin lenses of persuasion and tit-for-tat strategy. Make an agreement with me and we’ll both prosper. Attack me and I’ll attack you back even harder. His methods have produced impressive results in all sorts of unexpected areas, but for them to work, his counterparts need to be rational actors capable of understanding and acting in their own self interest.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a rational actor.
From its very earliest inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran has mirrored founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s belief that the United States (“the Great Satan”) and Israel (“the Little Satan”) are affronts to Islam that must be fought and destroyed. Catspaws Hezbollah and Hamas believe that the founding of Israel (“the Zionist entity”) was a literal affront to God that must be expunged through violent jihad.
‘The day the enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In the face of the Jews’ usurpation, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.’ (Article 15)
‘Ranks will close, fighters joining other fighters, and masse everywhere in the Islamic world will come forward in response to the call of duty, loudly proclaiming: ‘Hail to Jihad!’. This cry will reach the heavens and will go on being resounded until liberation is achieved, the invaders vanquished and Allah’s victory comes about.’ (Article 33)…
‘[Peace] initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement… Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the infidels as arbitrators in the lands of Islam… There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.’ (Article 13)
Honestly, until late into Trump’s first term, I would have agreed with Hamas that international conferences on peace in the middle east were exercises in futility. But the unexpected success of the Abraham Accords indicate that most Sunni states have finally come to believe that peaceful co-existence with Israel is a much more profitable proposition than fighting endless losing wars against it.
But the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas were acting on the doctrine of waqf and Islam’s division of the world into Dar al-Islam (the “House of Submission to Islam” AKA “the House of Peace”) and Dar al-Harb (the House of War). Under Islam, no land consecrated to Islam can ever be ruled by an unbeliever, and it is a duty of every Muslim to wage jihad against the non-Islamic rulers of such lands until they are restored to Dar al-Islam.
And don’t forget that Iran’s fundamentalist Twelver Shiia regime has devout apocalyptic eschatological beliefs about the return of the occulted Mahdi, one in which the Islamic Republic will create the conditions to hasten his return and reign before the Day of Judgment. Asking them to stop supporting terrorism in the wake of bombing and hyperinflation is like asking an Evangelical to give up their belief in the Rapture and the Second Coming in order to lower their gasoline bill. By the standards of economics, traditional geopolitics and game theory, they cannot be considered “rational actors.”
Some observers have argued that the U.S. has already “won” the war against Iran by shattering its nuclear program, decapitating its leadership and destroying numerous military assets while taking extremely few casualties. But the United States won just about every battle it fought in Afghanistan and Vietnam, but still lost those wars by letting its adversaries survive. If the current cycle continues, the U.S. and Israel will continue to pound the snot out of Iran only for it to proclaim that the U.S. has agreed to not only let it control the Strait, but will give it a new navy to boot.
For war to be decisive, ultimately somebody’s ass must be kicked and instruments of surrender signed. An actual treaty of surrender for Iran would specify that:
Iran gives up all claim to controlling the Hormuz Strait and pledges to allow free, unconditional passage of vessels.
Iran pledges to give up every single part of its nuclear program, including surrendering all enriched uranium and enrichment centrifuges, and agrees to unlimited International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of any site throughout the country.
Iran agrees to allow the supervised destruction of its ballistic missile program.
Iran agrees to stop all material and financial support of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as any other transnational jihadist organization outside Iran.
Iran pledges an immediate transition to a popularly-elected, secular democracy in which the existing fundamentalist Shiite theocracy has no role, with initial elections overseen by international observers appointed by the United States.
Iran promises limited autonomy to ethnic minorities (Kurds, Lurs, etc.) and religious freedom and tolerance to persecuted religious minorities (Sufis, Baha’is, Nizari Isma’ilis, etc., not to mention Christians, Jews and Sunnis).
In short, for a real, lasting peace, the Islamic Republic of Iran must stop being the government of Iran. Because its rulers are not rational actors, there is no level of persuasion short of absolute destruction that will prevent its messianic, fundamentalist leaders from pursuing nuclear weapons to wipe the grave offense to Allah that is Israel off the face of the earth. And I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that a full-scale nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel is not in the best interests of the United States.
Removing the Islamic Republic of Iran from power will not remotely be easy, and will have to be brought about by some combination of continued assassination and destruction of Revolutionary Guard assets, the use of regional proxy armies (such as the Kurds), possibly turning of non-IRGC military leadership and units, a popular uprising by (possibly U.S. armed and trained) Iranian civilians, and yes, even the dreaded “boots on the ground” from Israeli and U.S. forces and the occupation of, at the very least, Tehran and Qom, no matter how many “austere religious scholars” need to be dirtnapped along the way.
The U.S. lost Vietnam and Afghanistan because the insurgents we were fighting had sanctuary in, and were backed by, nation states (North Vietnam and Pakistan). That will not be the case in Iran, as the Sunni-dominated governments of Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are deeply unlikely to back a Shiite insurgency in Iran.
The cost of victory in Iran will be high, but failure to finally rid the world of a radical Islamic regime irredeemably hostile to the United States of America and a backer of transnational terrorism, especially given the considerable military assets already deployed into theater, will be much higher than slightly expensive gas.
Last week brought two developments in the EPIC City saga of attempts to build an “sharia city” west of Dallas. They were touched on in Friday’s LinkSwarm, but I’m going to recap them here as well, since they set the stage for today’s news.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has obtained a court order halting actions by an EPIC City-linked municipal utility district.
The case centers on allegations that the Double R Municipal Utility District No. 2A has been used to advance a controversial development project organized by the East Plano Islamic Center by skirting state oversight and standard MUD-creation procedures. The project, originally known as EPIC City, has been rebranded as the Meadow.
Judge Christine Nowak’s order blocks the district and its board from taking further steps to support the development while the litigation continues.
The state’s lawsuit focuses on a 2025 special meeting where the Double R MUD board allegedly resigned en masse, installed new directors at a remote roadside location identified only by GPS coordinates, and then quickly voted to annex more than 400 acres tied to the EPIC project.
We covered that bit of shady MUD shenanigans here.
State lawyers say that maneuver effectively transformed the MUD into a vehicle for EPIC City’s backers, allowing them to expand taxing authority and infrastructure support without going through the process of forming a new district.
After the annexation, regulators requested documents to confirm that the new board members met legal requirements to hold public office and levy taxes on residents inside the district.
According to the suit, records submitted by Double R MUD showed the individuals did not meet statutory qualifications—a finding the attorney general’s office said casts doubt on every action the board took, including the EPIC City annexation.
The state is asking the court to remove the disputed board members, unwind the 402.5-acre annexation tied to EPIC City, and restore what Paxton describes as lawful governance of the utility district.
Hunt County officials unanimously rejected plans for a controversial Muslim community originally known as EPIC City and rebranded as The Meadow, citing technical, regulatory, and legal deficiencies in the plat application.
Other than that, I’m sure it was fine…
During a meeting on Tuesday, Hunt County commissioners adopted a resolution “disapproving” the plat application submitted by developers of the subdivision, which was planned as an expansion of the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC).
Plans include up to 1,000 residences plus a mosque, school, and other amenities catering to Muslim families, located on more than 400 acres in unincorporated areas of Hunt and Collin counties.
Residents in both counties—and across Texas—have objected to communities like the proposed EPIC development, which Gov. Greg Abbott and other elected officials have referred to as “sharia cities.”
In addition, Attorney General Ken Paxton sent letters urging Collin and Hunt officials to reject EPIC’s plat applications while he sues the developers and related entities over alleged fraudulent activities surrounding the project.
Now comes news that another court order has blocked the utility district hard:
A state court judge in Collin County has temporarily blocked further actions by a utility district slated to service the controversial planned community known as EPIC City or The Meadow.
The court previously issued a temporary restraining order against the Double R Municipal Utility District No. 2A of Hunt and Collin Counties, which the state says appointed ineligible directors who then annexed the proposed Islamic development into the MUD.
Annexation into an existing MUD allowed developers to skirt new state regulations surrounding the creation of new utility districts.
On Monday, Judge Christine Nowak of the 493rd District Court in Collin County granted the state’s request for a temporary injunction after all parties agreed that the MUD’s current directors are not eligible to serve.
The question now is who will make decisions on behalf of the utility district going forward, and how that will affect the EPIC development.
“The state is just asking for a pause until we can figure out what’s going on,” Wesley Williams with the Texas attorney general’s office told Judge Nowak. “There’s a lot of secrecy surrounding this board.”
Texas Water Code authorizes the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to oversee MUDs, which are special districts granted power to issue bonds and levy property taxes for the purpose of providing water, wastewater, and other services to subdivisions in unincorporated areas of the state.
Snip.
Preliminary development applications have been rejected by Collin and Hunt officials for being incomplete. In both cases, EPIC developers’ submissions included “will serve” letters from Double R.
Such letters are required commitments from service providers that ensure proposed developments will be successful, Collin County’s Director of Engineering Clarence Daugherty testified Monday.
It was Daugherty who notified TCEQ that newly appointed Double R MUD directors might not be eligible, after his office reviewed EPIC’s initial application submitted late last year.
He testified that subsequent filings have continued to include Double R MUD as a service provider.
Due to the acknowledged ineligibility of the MUD’s current directors, the validity of those service commitments is now in question, which may delay development approvals needed for the EPIC City project to proceed.
“Delay” or completely destroy.
Williams explained to the court that the state’s Water Code establishes eligibility requirements for MUD directors.
Five new Double R directors—Yaneli Molina, Hatim Mahmoud Yusuf, Nadeem Ashraf Khan, Asim Hussain Khan, and Faisal Abbas—were purportedly appointed during a September 12, 2025, meeting in which the previous board members resigned.
What do you think the odds are that particular slate wins an actual MUD election in exurban/rural Texas?
Molina’s attorney said Monday his client had resigned on March 19, and she signed an agreement in court to abide by the terms of the injunction.
Williams argued that none of the new directors met the eligibility requirements and concluded they thus had no authority to accept the resignations of the previous directors or to approve annexing the EPIC City property into the utility district.
I’m going to guess that none of those “directors” actually live within the boundaries of the MUD.
He asked the court to “freeze the status quo to just prior to the September 12 meeting.”
The order granting a temporary injunction states that “Double R MUD shall immediately cease all operations and activities until such time qualified directors are appointed by the TCEQ pursuant to Texas Water Code 49.105(c).”
TCEQ Districts Section Manager Justin Taack testified Monday that MUD board vacancies can be filled by the board or by his agency.
Defense attorney Jerry Hall with Mayer LLP said he agreed his three clients, Abbas and the Kahns, were not eligible to serve as Double R MUD directors.
Sounds like pretty much everything about that shady midnight MUD board switch was illegal, wasn’t it?
There are probably times and places you could probably have gotten away with pulling a fast one for a land development deal in Texas, especially if people weren’t paying attention and/or a powerful, well-connected figure wanted the deal to go through. H. Ross Perot Jr. sort of got away with pulling several fast ones in his late 80s-early 90s “Perotville” development north of Fort Worth. The arcana of plats, MUD boards and regulatory filings are very far indeed from the consciousness of most Texans.
But there’s a big difference between getting away with a little land deal hanky panky when you’ve got billions backing you and few people are paying attention, and trying to pull a fast one when the very highest levels of state government, including the Governor and Attorney General, have put your illegal “Sharia City” idea in their crosshairs. (And they had the bad luck of their deal coming to light after the Colony Ridge fiasco raised awareness of questionable land developments run by shady operatives.)
Trying to pull a fast one when every local and state regulatory agency already has you under a microscope is simply epic stupidity. If the people running the East Plano Islamic Center had simply cooled their heels and bided their time, dotted the Is and crossed the Ts on every part of their regulatory paperwork, and sworn up and down that, no sir, we’re not illegally limiting our highly speculative land development to Muslims, they might eventually have gotten the thing across the finish line.
Now they’ll be lucky if some of them don’t end up in prison.
There’s a raging debate on the right about whether the Trump Administration should back regime change in Iran or not. After holding off on killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (reportedly at Trump’s behest), Israel seems quite open to taking him out along with any remnants of the rest of the regime. Somefigures on the right (Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens being two, though each have being moving, at various speeds, to the right’s fringes for a while now) are absolutely dead-set against regime change in Iran.
Over all of this, of course, hangs the specter of the Iraq War(s), in which the United States expended trillions of dollars and thousands of soldiers lives in order to gain very little (deposing Saddam and sorta, kinda, stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq). And for all this we got to endure three decades of heightened terrorist attacks due to having U.S. troops in “the land of the two mosques.” So it’s understandable that Americans would want to avoid another long slog of nation-building in a failed Middle East state to prevent it from becoming a haven for transnational Islamic terrorism.
Understandable, but not applicable to Iran, for the most basic of reasons. Iraq was an Arab state with Sunni minority leaders ruling over a restive Shiite minority. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a Persian nation currently ruled over by a Shiite theocratic dictatorship that is already one of the region’s main (if not the main) financial supporters of terrorism. There’s no danger of an Arab Sunni terrorist group like the Islamic State taking hold, because the population of Sunni Arabs in Iran is too small for such an insurgency to take hold. And there’s no nation in the Middle East that seems likely to pick up the mantle of funding Shiite fundamentalism in the region. (Qatar’s ruling family is Sunni, as is the overwhelming majority of Pakistan.) Ali Khamenei is the head of the snake, and when his regime dies, the snake dies as well.
If Israel can finish off Khamenei’s regime, what follows it will not be something worse, or even a failed state like Somalia. There is every sign that ordinary Iranians are weary to death of being under the heel of the Mullahs, and what will follow more likely to be more secular and western-oriented state than what is there now (which is, to be sure, a very low bar.) And though Iran is somewhat multi-ethnic, the minorities there (primarily Kurds and various Turkish ethnicities) are too small compared to the ethnic Persian majority to seriously contend for control of the Iranian state. (The Kurds could, in theory, launch a bid for independence (or, like in Iraq and Syria, quasi-independence), but without U.S. support are unlikely to make much headway. Their best play may be to negotiate broad autonomy with any new government.)
Could there be a civil war power struggle to rule post-theocratic Iran? Possibly. Still a better outcome for us than a theocratic, terrorist-supporting Islamic state with nuclear weapons. Ditto a military dictatorship, as long as they allowed an end to the nuclear weapons program. Ditto any number of other possible political outcomes, from a modern, secular democratic state to a (deeply unlikely) restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy. All are almost certainly improvements over the fanatical, institutional hostility to the west shown by the mullahs. (Not to mention the fanatical, institutional hostility to Israel. Historically, Persians and Jews have gotten along well, both being outsiders to the Turks and Arabs running the Ottoman Empire.)
There’s no reason to fear a post-theocratic Iran because we won’t be the one having to do nation-building or pick up the pieces.
Getting rid of a government than ritually chants “Death to America” and funds terrorists that have killed numerous Americans throughout the life of the regime must be considered a desirable outcome. The Abraham Accords indicated that a number of Sunni Arab states are abandoning their institutional hostility to Israel and the west, and toppling the mullahs will dry up funds for Shiite terrorism across the world as well. The result will not automatically make the Middle East peaceful and prosperous, but will probably calm things down enough to measurably move the region a bit closer to those admittedly very distant goals.
Welcome to Epic City and Epic Ranches! A Muslim town built by and for Muslims and Muslims only. Deep in the heart of Texas!
Yes, this is a real thing. We have Epic city, with the outskirts having a little more room at the Epic Ranches!
An entire city of over 1,000 people, 30 minutes outside of Dallas.
I think we’re running into some definitional issues here. The East Plano Islamic Center, which seems to be the managing entity here, is in Plano itself. That can fairly be characterized as “30 minutes outside Dallas,” at least at non-rush hour times. Epic Ranches, north of Josephine, is much further out, on the other side of two lakes, and current Google Maps images show a whole lot of nothing there.
Filled. So why not build Epic Ranches to meet demand for Muslims who weren’t quick enough to get into the city?
Welcome to EPIC Ranches, where we are committed to building a vibrant and inclusive community that serves the evolving needs of the Muslim community. Our vision is rooted in creating a safe and purpose-built environment that fosters growth, connection, and prosperity for all who call EPIC City home.
They’ve got Islamic schools, mosques, stores. Everything that is needed for a Muslim to live comfortably in their own city to make sure they don’t have the opportunity to assimilate into American culture.
I think you can see some problems looming here. So does the State of Texas, starting with the securities law concerns.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced that the Texas State Securities Board has launched an investigation into the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) and its affiliated entities for potential violations of state and federal securities laws, including possible investor fraud.
According to the governor, the probe centers around whether EPIC has failed to comply with legal requirements meant to protect investors from fraud and financial abuse.
“The group behind the proposed East Plano Islamic Center compound may be misleading investors,” said Abbott. “Defrauding Texans will not be tolerated. The Texas State Securities Board is conducting a thorough investigation to ensure Texans are protected from financial harm that is alleged to have been caused by EPIC.”
Given all that nothing currently out there, I’m wondering if it’s more like the Rockford Files episode “The Great Blue Lake Land and Development Company,” where Jim stumbles across a real estate scam selling housing development lots (including some “lakeside”) out in the middle of a desert, than a real Sharia City.
“All entities in Texas must follow state law, not Sharia law,” he added.
Gov. Greg Abbott has announced that another state agency will be investigating a controversial real estate development in North Texas, this time for “potential discrimination” in violation of the Texas Fair Housing Act.
The East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) and its “EPIC City” development have come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks. The Josephine-based development is planned to cover more than 400 acres of land, which will include more than 1,000 homes, a mosque, and schools.
The announcement video for the community states it is designed to “[bring] Islam to the forefront” and will “celebrate diversity and promote unity … to foster a sense of belonging and inclusivity for all residents regardless of their background.”
Just days ago, Abbott announced that he had directed the Texas State Securities Board to investigate and uncover “potential failures to comply with applicable state and federal securities requirements, including protections against fraud.” He also issued a cease and desist letter from the Texas Funeral Service to “immediately stop all illegal funeral service operations.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton also said he had opened a Civil Investigation Demand (CID) regarding EPIC and its investment firm, Community Capital Partner (CCP) LP, stating that it has “raised a number of concerns.”
Now, Abbott is directing the Texas Workforce Commission to begin investigating EPIC for “potentially breaking state fair housing laws by refusing to sell or rent housing to certain groups based on religion or other protected traits.”
The Texas Fair Housing Act prevents discriminatory sale or rentals of real estate based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.
A controversial new residential development near Dallas designed to address the “evolving needs of the Muslim community” has caught the eye of some Texas’ top elected officials.
The project, initiated by the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) and called EPIC City 2.0, is a planned development created by EPIC’s Community Capital Partner (CCP) LP. It describes itself as a “vibrant and inclusive community” where a “thriving ecosystem” will be created for “all who choose to call EPIC City home.”
Located in Josephine, the development will encompass 402 acres of land and has preliminary plans to include a mosque, more than 1,000 homes, and private schools — with utilities provided through an approved Municipal Utility District.
The announcement video for the community states it was designed to “[bring] Islam to the forefront” and will “celebrate diversity and promote unity… to foster a sense of belonging and inclusivity for all residents regardless of their background.”
Controversy began to surround the residential development online, especially after Gov. Greg Abbott made a post commenting on the project: “To be clear, Sharia law is not allowed in Texas.”
“Nor are Sharia cities. Nor are ‘no go zones’ which this project seems to imply,” Abbott added.
“Bottom line. The project as proposed in the video is not allowed in Texas.”
Right now, EPIC City 2.0 seems more like a highly speculative real estate project than an actual threat, but Abbott and Paxton have moved swiftly to nip the potential threat in the bud.
Given how long the illegal alien problem in Colony Ridge was allowed to metastasize before state officials looked into it, I’m glad they’re taking a pro-active approach to EPIC City 2.0 before it becomes a problem.
In some under-reported news, “Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday that the intelligence community maintains its assessment from prior years that Iran is not currently actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, but that open discussion of nuclearization has increased inside the regime.”
“The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard said in her opening remarks at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
But, Gabbard added, “In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Gabbard also said that the full impacts of renewed sanctions on Iran are not yet in effect, but that the “message … is certainly heard.”
The intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, released in conjunction with the hearing, predicts that Iran will continue efforts to threaten U.S. citizens globally and develop networks and conduct operations inside the United States.
It also describes Iran’s military capabilities and proxy armies as an ongoing threat to the U.S. and its allies, despite Israeli successes in degrading those capabilities.
“The IC assesses Iran’s prospects for reconstituting force losses and posing a credible deterrent, particularly to Israeli actions, are dim in the near-term,” the report continues.
Color me skeptical on Iran not developing nukes, for a number of reasons:
The Trump Administration has only been in office a hair over two months, and Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed February 12, a bit less than that, meaning that there has not been enough time for an effective screening and purge of the national security apparatus. I’m sure vast swathes of deadwood left over from the Obama and Biden Administrations, including the careerists still in place from official efforts to sell the infamous Obama Iran deal to a properly skeptical public. As such, their judgment can’t be trusted.
We have no way of knowing just how much Uranium Iran has enriched, or how many enrichment sites Iran actually has, and there’s no reason to believe that same deadwood was terribly motivated under Obama to uncover them, given how desperately he wanted the Iran deal. Given the revelations that continue to come out from DOGE’s deep dive into government finances, it seems only reasonable to assume that untold amounts of that Iran deal cash found its way back into Democratic grandee pockets.
The entire existence of the Islamic Republic of Iran is predicated on the theocratic theories of Ayatollah Khomeini, who hated the United States, Israel and democracy long before the current ideological core of the Democratic Party did. Given its theocratic roots, Iran’s current leaders would have no compunction to lying the officials of any non-Islamic state that dwells in dar al-harb (the house of war), which it considers (along with the Sunni states) to be its enemies.
Moreover, typical Shia Twelver eschatology believes in an apocalyptic Day of Judgment when the 12th (occluded) imam, AKA the Mahdi, will reveal himself and help purify the world. Indeed, one of Khomeini’s honorifics was Na’eb-e Imam (Deputy to the Twelfth Imam). Therefore, there is little reason to believe the mullahs currently running the Islamic Republic of Iran would balk at unleashing nuclear weapons on its enemies, especially if they thought it would bring about the return of the Mahdi. And remember that Iranian catspaw Hamas believes the mere existence of Israel is an affront to God, and that destroying it is their holy duty.
So I would still take any intelligence claims about knowing the precise state of Iran’s nuclear program with several grains of salt.
Another deep freeze week here in Texas, with temperatures below freezing most of the week, but the state grid seems to be holding, and I haven’t seen any widespread power outages. I did lose power, but only for five minutes.
This week: More waste and corruption exposed by DOGE, the Secretary of Defense gets a spite audit from the IRS, and Texas rolls out plans for securing cybersecurity and nuclear power futures. Plus an unusual amount of stories about China, AI, Chinese AI, airlines, Canada, and an airliner in Canada.
Judge says that DOGE can access student financial aid data. “US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied an emergency filing to block DOGE’s access to federal records and government layoffs – saying in a 10-page decision that the 14 states who brought the lawsuit have failed to meet the burden of proof to prove ‘imminent, irreparable harm.'”
“A judge who blocked President Trump’s federal spending freeze is Chairman Emeritus of a nonprofit that will continue to receive millions in government funding as a result of his ruling, in an apparent conflict of interest seen as a second cause for the judge’s impeachment. On Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) announced articles of impeachment against federal Judge John McConnell on the grounds that he overreached his authority and engaged in partisan activism by blocking Trump’s executive order freezing federal funding while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) searches for wasteful spending. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Doug Ross has chosen 20 of the best examples of waste and fraud DOGE has discovered “Stacey Abrams/Power Forward Communities $2 Billion Grant (2025). DOGE uncovered $2 billion in taxpayer funds allocated to Power Forward Communities, tied to Stacey Abrams via Rewiring America, from a $20 billion EPA grant in April 2024. With $100 in revenue, it’s under scrutiny for potential fraud.”
The Democratic Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.
Despite enjoying a huge lead in fundraising, legacy media favoritism, and incumbency, in the 2024 election, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump. Ever since, they have offered nothing new, no novel agenda, no innovative policies—nothing other than screaming that they are loudly against everything and anything that the president is for.
In the past, what did they accomplish by following their prior two impeachments with attempts to de-ballot Trump? Who thought sending an FBI swat team to raid Trump’s home or waging five lawfare civil and criminal suits and issuing 91 felony indictments against him would win over the public?
Was conducting a media barrage of Hitler-Trump invectives, or lowering the bar of demonization that likely led to two assassination attempts of Trump a good way to win an election?
Apparently not, given the Democrats have now lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate. The Supreme Court is conservative. They have no power to subpoena anyone; they cannot block any nomination. Much of their old administrative state control is eroding. All the main issues—the economy, energy, border security, illegal immigration, crime, DEI/woke, and foreign policy—poll against the Democrats. The more they shouted that biological men must be able to compete as transgendered females in women’s sports, the more that 80% of the public disagreed, women were turned off, and the absurd idea was exploded by Trump.
The power of the administrative state, the legacy network news, print media, and Silicon Valley’s social media and search engines, the billions that poured into the Biden and Harris campaign all went for naught.
The efforts of moderators to warp debates, of network news to edit out unfavorable Harris or Biden comments, of leftists to cancel, deplatform, ostracize, censor, and shadow ban their enemies have failed. More likely to succeed now are numerous lawsuits against leftwing media for chronic defamation and censorship.
Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democratic Party do?
If they were stable, then they might renounce political suicide and perhaps return to something akin to the Clinton efforts of 1992 and 1996. Then the once self-destructive Democrats finally gave up on disastrous out-of-touch McGovernism, Carterism, an Dukakism. Instead, they began to embrace legal-only immigration, secure borders, balanced budgets, support for law enforcement, and meritocracy.
The result?
After twelve years in the wilderness (1980-1992), the Democrats regained power for the next 16 of 24 years—only in the second term of Barack Obama to go full radical Jacobin and soon lose it.
The current self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.
But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.
On immigration, after wiping out the border and allowing in 12 million illegal aliens, including more than 500,000 suspected felons, they seem deliberately to be alienating public opinion even further.
So, thousands of leftists swarm and block the freeways of Los Angeles to protest the deportations of criminals. And how exactly?
By enraging middle-class commuters, while burning the flag of the country that they demand must allow them to stay, while chauvinistically waving the flag of the country to which under no circumstances they wish to return?
New Jersey Democratic governor Patrick Murphy idiotically virtue-signaled that he would defy the law, as he bragged that he was harboring an illegal alien living above his garage.
Then, when apprised that such performance-art showboating was a felony, in theory entailing a long prison sentence, the now buffoonish governor changed his narrative that the occupant of his garage was not really illegally living above his garage.
Democratic governors and mayors vie, bragging that they will be foremost in breaking the law by impeding the efforts of the federal immigration services to find and deport illegal aliens—for now, half a million criminals. Other activists are tipping off criminal illegal-alien gang leaders to avoid US government efforts to apprehend such dangerous criminals.
Is that the way to win back the working classes? By ensuring that the felons of M-13, Norteños, Sureños, and Tren de Aragua can flee and put in danger fellow American police officers?
Elon Musk has been appointed by Donald Trump to create a new government agency, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), to find waste, fraud, and abuse in the government spending of taxpayers money.
He and his young team of tech standouts have exposed shocking waste and fraud, but mostly insanity, in the USAID’s $50 billion of foreign aid grants.
Why are Americans paying for overseas drag shows or gay and trans advocacy in culturally imperialist fashion in traditional and conservative societies abroad? Why are we paying eight percent of the budget of the hardcore left-wing BBC? Is that a way back to the White House?
Do Politico, the New York Times, or the Wuhan gain-in-function virology lab and birthplace of COVID-19 really need millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars?
Do Democrats really think the middle class will hate Elon Musk for exposing that their government may well have handed the communist Chinese the necessary cash to birth a manufactured killer virus that took one million American lives?
Is that a winning strategy—to scream in Congress that Musk is a Nazi, a dictator for showing that Biden’s USAID under leftist Samantha Power was a clearing house to enrich and empower well-off leftist organizations that only weakened their own country abroad?
On December 6, 2024, a federal judge ordered the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release documents related to the emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. These documents had been hidden from public view.
The legal battle traces back to September 2021, when attorney Aaron Siri filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on behalf of the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. The plaintiffs sought access to the vast trove of documents the FDA relied on to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.
Initially, the FDA proposed a slow release schedule. In November 2021, the agency stated it would release just 500 pages per month—a pace that would have stretched the full disclosure process to 75 years.
However, in January 2022, District Judge Mark Pittman of Texas rejected the FDA’s proposal, ordering the agency to expedite its release to 55,000 pages per month, aiming to complete the disclosure of all 450,000 pages by August 2022.
As the documents trickled out, researchers began uncovering glaring gaps that prevented a systematic review of the data. These gaps fueled suspicions about what else the FDA might be withholding.
It became evident that the FDA had withheld records directly tied to its emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s vaccine, estimated to be over one million pages.
These documents, which the FDA had full knowledge of, were excluded from earlier disclosures, effectively misleading the judiciary and undermining public trust.
People need to go to jail.
Trump and Musk’s attempts to cut federal waste are super popular.
In recent months, Democrats have manufactured an elaborate narrative around Donald Trump’s push to streamline government operations and eliminate waste, branding it as a “constitutional crisis.” This exaggerated portrayal overlooks a critical reality: many Americans, particularly those who are politically moderate, actually support Trump’s initiatives aimed at reducing the size of government.
A recent focus group composed of Arizona swing voters, including those who previously backed Joe Biden, revealed a striking consensus on this issue: they overwhelmingly approve of Trump’s agenda and Elon Musk’s efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to make government more efficient. “Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump’s actions since taking office — and most also support Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government,” reports Axios.
Vice President JD Vance confronted European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Friday over their support for authoritarian restrictions on speech, putting the assembled dignitaries on notice that the Trump administration expects the continent to revive its commitment to Western values.
“The threat that I worry most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” Vance said. “When I look at Europe today, it’s not clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.”
The vice president recited a litany of examples, taken from across Europe, in which governments cracked down on politically disfavored ideas.
In Brussels for example, officials notified citizens that they would shut down social media platforms “during times of civil unrest” if users post so-called hateful content. Vance also cited examples taken from Germany, where “police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online”; Sweden, where a judge recently explained to a man accused of participating in a Koran burning that he does not have “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief,”; and the United Kingdom, where citizens can be arrested for silently praying within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear is in retreat,” Vance said.
The vice president lamented Europe’s abandonment of other democratic values, such as border security, he said, adding that Europeans should work with anti-immigration factions to address the record-breaking influx of illegal immigrants into Europe.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, [we] also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense,” Vance said.
A majority of French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese citizens believe that their countries should have stricter border security measures to curb illegal immigration, according to a poll conducted by the nonprofit EU-US Forum and the Tyson Group. Most respondents from France, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands also agree that “I am more worried today than I was a decade ago about government censorship of my ideas,” according to the same poll.
Vance connected the massive flow of migrants into Europe with recent terrorist attacks, such as the one carried out this week in Munich by a 24-year-old Afghan migrant. The man has an Islamist motive, police said, and he plowed a car into a crowd of people blocks away from where the Security Conference is being held, injuring at least 30.
Another Saudi migrant rammed a car into a Christmas marked in central Germany last December, injuring hundreds, and killing five.
“Over the span of a decade, we saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” Vance said.
European leaders responded with a large bout of pearl-clutching and a chorus of “Well, I never!”
“Legislators File ‘Atomic Texas’ Act to Spark Nuclear Power ‘Renaissance.’ With the advent of small modular nuclear reactors, the nuclear industry feels bullish on a revival of nuclear power. Gov. Greg Abbott called for forging a “nuclear power renaissance” in Texas during his 2025 State of the State address, two legislators have filed legislation intended to make the concept a reality. State Rep. Drew Darby’s House Bill (HB) 2678 would create the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Authority and a low-interest loan fund to go with it, and is the companion bill to state Sen. Tan Parker’s (R-Flower Mound) Senate Bill 1105.”
Ukraine hits another oil refinery. I’m ignoring the news about U.S. Russian talks, etc., because Trump does a lot of persuasion bracketing, and it’s fruitless to place too much import on it at this stage.
New York governor Kathy Hochul says she might remove new York City Mayor Eric Adams from office, now that trump’s Department of Justice has dropped charges against Adams. My working assumption is that since Adams is a New York Democratic politician, he’s guilty as sin, but it’s funny how Hochul only started paying attention to Adams’ alleged misdeed when he started cooperating with Trump on deporting illegal aliens…
With the Trump administration cutting off billions of US taxpayer funding for the USAID international slush fund, formerly flush NGOs are now begging woke EU nations for money to continue operations, according to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“WARNING! Our fears have come true: the globalist-liberal-Soros NGO network is fleeing to Brussels, after President Trump dealt a huge blow to their activities in the US,” Orbán wrote in a Tuesday post to X. “Now 63 of them are asking Brussels for money, under the guise of various human rights projects. Not going to happen! We will not let them find safe haven in Europe!”
“The USAID-files exposed the dark practices of the globalist network. We will not take the bait again!”
“A series of by-elections were held for local government seats on Thursday, with Nigel Farage’s [Reform] party storming to victory in Trevethin and Penygarn in Torfaen, Wales, gaining 47% of the vote from a standing start. Labour plummeted a whopping 49.2% to just 26.6% of the vote, down from 75.8% last time. Two independents then came in third and fourth, with the Greens in fifth on 2.6%.” The Tories didn’t even run a candidate.
Gov. Greg Abbott delivered his State of the State address several days ago, outlining his priorities for the 89th Legislative Session and listing his emergency items, which included an unexpected addition — the creation of a Texas Cyber Command.
“We must deploy cutting edge capabilities to better secure our State,” Abbott declared.
Minutes after the proclamation was made, information from the governor’s office on the new proposition was circulated, detailing the necessity of a Texas Cyber Command to increase the state’s ability to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats and hostile foreign adversaries like China, Iran, Russia, and “other rogue outlets” around the world.
The governor’s plan is to have the new venture be headquartered in San Antonio — a city with a large presence of cybersecurity experts, including the University of Texas (UT) at San Antonio, which is a member of the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) Academic Engagement Network.
Austin has at least as many cybersecurity firms as San Antonio…
“Attorney General Paxton Launches Investigation Into Chinese AI App. Paxton expressed concerns that artificial intelligence company DeepSeek could be violating the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act.”
In Houston: “22-year-old Chilean national arrested with device that disabled communication between arresting officers.”
“Transgender migrant featured in NYC Pride Parade charged with raping 14-year-old boy in public restroom.” “A migrant transgender woman [man] wanted by federal immigration officials allegedly stalked and raped a boy in Manhattan this week, The Post has learned. Nicol Suarez allegedly followed the 14-year-old into the bathroom of a bodega across the street from Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem Tuesday and attacked him, police and sources said.”
Chinese foreign investment declines 99% in the last three years. That’s what happens when you’ve got dirty commies being jerks of the world…
Accidents will happen. “Trump Administration Un-Fires Hundreds Of Nuclear Weapon Workers.”
California’s one party Democratic rule is so incompetent and burdensome that weed dealers can’t make money selling pot to Californians. “California’s legal cannabis market has hit another grim milestone: There are now 10,828 inactive and surrendered pot licenses in the state and only 8,514 active ones, meaning dead pot licenses now outnumber active ones.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Jihad terrorism is still very much alive in Africa. “70 Christians Decapitated in Church in Democratic Republic of Congo. DRC also faces violence from the Rwanda-backed armed group M23.”
“Trump Administration Pulls Approval of NYC Congestion Toll.” “The congestion toll came into effect last month, imposing a $9 charge on drivers entering Manhattan below 60th street. The tax will increase by $3 increments in 2028 and 2031 as drivers adjust to the program, if it remains in place.” London’s “carbon tax” is widely unpopular with drivers as well, so I imagine New York drivers are just as livid.
Half a year gone already. This week: The debate confirmed that pretty much everything Republican said about Biden being old and out of it was true, people can’t afford housing anymore, the Supreme Court reigns in the administrative state, a whole bunch of layoffs come down the pike, two sorta, kinda coups, fake meat doesn’t pay, and we say farewell to a Texas original. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden looked old and disoriented during Thursday’s CNN debate with Donald Trump. He spoke in a quiet and hoarse voice, made some incoherent answers, and often stumbled over his own words.
It was a lackluster performance that played directly into Republican depictions of the 81-year-old president – the oldest president in American history — as too old and frail to serve another four years in office. Trump said as much during the debate.
“He’s not equipped to be president,” Trump said. “You know it and I know it.”
The debate was a highly personal affair between two men who made little effort during their nearly two hours on stage to contain their disdain for one another.
Biden called Donald Trump a “loser,” and a “whiner” with the “morals of an alley cat.” Trump accused Biden of turning the United States into a “third-world nation” and of being the “worst president in history by far, and everybody knows it.”
Trump turned in a spirited performance, hammering Biden on inflation and the immigration crisis under his watch. But Biden’s struggles seemed to be the major takeaway for CNN’s post-debate panel, which reported that senior Democrats are in an “aggressive panic” over their party leader’s apparent frailty.
Speaking about improvements he’s claiming at the border, Biden at one point seemed lost, saying: “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on, the total initiative relative what we’re going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers.”
“I don’t really know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump replied. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
At another point, Biden got visibly lost when talking about his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to wipe out the debt, saying he wanted to make sure “that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with, with, with the Covid, excuse me, with dealing with everything we had to do with, look, we finally beat Medicare.”
“Well, he’s right,” Trump said, “he did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”
He stammered. He stumbled. And, with fewer than five months to November, he played straight into Democrats’ worst fears — that he’s fumbling away this election to Donald Trump.
The alarm bells for Democrats started ringing the second Biden started speaking in a haltingly hoarse voice. Minutes into the debate, he struggled to mount an effective defense of the economy on his watch and flubbed the description of key health initiatives he’s made central to his reelection bid, saying “we finally beat Medicare” and incorrectly stating how much his administration lowered the price of insulin. He talked himself into a corner on Afghanistan, bringing up his administration’s botched withdrawal unprompted. He repeatedly mixed up “billion” and “million,” and found himself stuck for long stretches of the 90-minute debate playing defense.
And when he wasn’t speaking, he stood frozen behind his podium, mouth agape, his eyes wide and unblinking for long stretches of time.
“Biden is toast — calling it now,” said Jay Surdukowski, an attorney and Democratic activist from New Hampshire who co-chaired former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2016 presidential campaign in the state.
In text messages with POLITICO, Democrats expressed confusion and concern as they watched the first minutes of the event. One former Biden White House and campaign aide, granted anonymity to discuss the matter, called it “terrible,” adding that they have had to ask themselves over and over: “What did he just say? This is crazy.”
Sales of previously owned homes are sitting at a 30-year low and didn’t move much in May as prices hit a new record and mortgage rates remain high.
So-called existing home sales in May were essentially flat, down 0.7% from April to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 4.11 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors, or NAR. Sales fell 2.8% from May of last year …
The median price of an existing home sold in May was $419,300, a record-high price in the Realtors’ recording and up 5.8% year over year. The gain was the strongest since October 2022. Prices gained in all regions.
The Realtors noted in a release that the mortgage payment for a typical home today is more than double what it was five years ago.
It’s almost as though the Biden Recession, constrained supply (a great deal from blue locale regulation that prevent housing from being built), and high interest rates mean that no one wants to buy or sell.
According to a new report, the average renter can’t afford a typical U.S. apartment.
According to Redfin, the typical U.S. renter household earns about $54,712 per year, which is 17.3% less than the $66,120 needed to afford the median-priced apartment at $1,653 per month. This means that 61% of renters can’t afford their housing without significant financial stress.
Snip.
Inflation, which has surged during Biden’s presidency, certainly exacerbates this issue. Rising costs for essentials like food, gas, and utilities leave renters with even less disposable income to cover their housing costs. Despite promises to address affordability and economic inequality, the Biden administration has doubled down with claims that inflation is going down and that wage growth has outpaced it — which isn’t true. Biden has made it more difficult for Americans to achieve financial stability.
Pixar (part of Disney) (175 people, 14% of the company, who must have been thrilled to get a pink slip and then see unwoke Inside Out 2 go on to be Disney’s biggest movie of the year)
The Supreme Court on Friday issued a ruling overturning the 1984 Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council case, striking down a previous decision that granted federal agencies immensely broad power to draw up regulations without congressional approval.
The Court ruled in both Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce — two nearly identical cases — that regulatory agencies will no longer be able to fill in the blanks of vague legislation in 6-2 and 6-3 decisions, respectively. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the first case because she sat on the federal appeals court that had previously heard the case.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it is not the place of agencies to clarify ambiguous legislation.
“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” he wrote. “Courts do. The Framers, as noted, anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment.”
Writing a concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that the concept of Chevron deference “undermines” many of the principles on which the United States was founded.
“It precludes courts from exercising the judicial power vested in them by Article III to say what the law is,” he wrote. “It forces judges to abandon the best reading of the law in favor of views of those presently holding the reins of the Executive Branch. It requires judges to change, and change again, their interpretations of the law as and when the government demands.”
This is a huge blow to the unchecked administrative state and a key decision in helping reign in untrammeled executive regulatory power.
This looks like it will put a crimp in Biden’s amnesty plans: “SCOTUS rules 6-3 that there’s no constitutional guarantee for non-citizen spouses to be admitted to the US.”
Russia’s newest S-500 air defense system has been deployed to Crimea to defend against ATACMS strike. Result? It was destroyed by an ATACMS strike. “This is a big embarrassment for Russia, that its newest and best missile system has had its clock clean by 30-year-old missiles.”
“War crimes arrest warrants issued for top Russian officials. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s former defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov.” It would make one hell of a Dog The Bounty Hunter episode…
Andrew Cuomo (D-isgrace) admits that the bogus Trump hush money kangaroo trial should never have been held. “If his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn’t running for president. I’m the former AG in New York. I’m telling you, that case would have never been brought. And that’s what is offensive to people. And it should be!” Broken clock, twice a day.
Federal judges in Missouri and Kansas issued separate rulings on June 24 blocking key sections of the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, which is designed to lower student loan payments and forgive debts.
A new version of the program that would reduce payments and shorten maximum repayment periods was set to take effect in July.
U.S. District Judge Michael Crabtree for the District of Kansas ruled that the Republican states were likely to succeed in their claim that the department lacked explicit congressional authority to enact this portion of the program.
“Defendants have offered colorable, plausible interpretations of the Higher Education Act that could authorize the SAVE Plan, but those interpretations fall short of clear congressional authorization,” Judge Crabtree, who was appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote on Monday.
However, he declined to block the program entirely, expressing concerns about the practicality of reversing parts of the plan that had already been implemented. He also said that Republicans’ delay in filing their lawsuits undermined their arguments that there was an immediate need to halt the entire program.
In a separate decision on the same day, U.S. District Judge Judge John Ross for the Eastern District of Missouri, also a President Obama appointee, blocked the department from forgiving “any further loan[s]” under SAVE until he decides the full case. His order said that such actions would likely strip state loan operators of revenue.
Judge Ross also suggested that the SAVE program might have exceeded the authority of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and that Missouri would likely be harmed by the program.
Just imagine if a Republican judge got a chance to rule on it…
“Kenya Protesters Storm Parliament, Police Fire Live Rounds, After Lawmakers Unleash Eco-Austerity.” Seems like $2.7 billion in taxes to serve nebulous “green” goals is unpopular in a country where the per capita GDP is $2,099. Thanks, IMF…
And an attempted coup in Bolivia evidently failed. President Luis Arce is a bit of a socialist scumbag, so it remains to be seen if he intends to follow in Venezuela’s footsteps to economic ruin.
Not only are the massive crowds a problem, but this year the Saudi city is under an excessive heat warning, with highs at times having reached between 110 and 115°F during the day, and 100°F even at night. This has resulted in what could be a record amount of heat injuries and deaths by the pilgrimage season’s end. On Monday the Saudi weather service recorded a temperature of 125 degrees Fahrenheit at Mecca’s Grand Mosque.
Many of the dead were “unauthorized pilgrims” who hadn’t paid their Hajj fee. “This group was more vulnerable to the heat because, without official permits, they could not access air-conditioned spaces provided by Saudi authorities for the 1.8 million authorized pilgrims to cool down after hours of walking and praying outside.”
More accused perverts in classrooms. “Former Denton ISD Coach Arrested for Online Solicitation of a Minor. A mother from another school district says she tried to warn Denton ISD of an inappropriate encounter her daughter had with district employee Justin Wallace Carter.”
“A Uvalde County grand jury has indicted former school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and another former district officer on charges of child endangerment, the first criminal charges brought against law enforcement for the botched response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, the San Antonio Express-News reported. Arredondo and Adrian Gonzales face felony charges of abandoning or endangering a child.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
A fun edition of What’s My Line featuring America’s most decorated war hero.
Kinky Friedman, RIP. He was a Texas original, an entertaining musician, a successful author, and the last interesting Democrat in Texas. Dwight already posted “The Ballad of Charlie Whitman,” so I direct you over there. I have an inscribed (not to me) first of A Case of Lone Star, and I should probably read that next.
The biggest story right now is that Abbott isn’t backing down from securing the border, and a whole bunch of states are backing him in his high-profile fight with the federal government.
As the standoff continues between the Biden administration and the state of Texas over the crisis at the southern border, Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas will continue to push back against the invasion.
At the center of the current controversy is a recent U.S. Supreme Court order that allows federal agents to remove concertina wire and other barriers placed along the Rio Grande by the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Ground Zero of that battle is Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, where state forces have taken over a park along the border and have thus far prevented federal officials from entering.
Abbott says the state is taking action because of a failure from the Biden administration.
“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now. President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them,” said Abbott. “The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration. Despite having been put on notice in a series of letters—one of which I delivered to him by hand—President Biden has ignored Texas’s demand that he perform his constitutional duties.”
He went on to say the U.S. Constitution allows for states to push back against invasions:
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border. That is why the Framers included both Article IV, § 4, which promises that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”
To that end, Abbott cited an executive order issued by him in November 2022 to “invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself.”
“President Biden and his Administration have left Americans and our country completely vulnerable to unprecedented illegal immigration pouring across the Southern border. Instead of upholding the rule of law and securing the border, the Biden Administration has attacked and sued Texas for stepping up to protect American citizens from historic levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and terrorists entering our country.
“We stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border. We do it in part because the Biden Administration is refusing to enforce immigration laws already on the books and is illegally allowing mass parole across America of migrants who entered our country illegally.
“The authors of the U.S. Constitution made clear that in times like this, states have a right of self-defense, under Article 4, Section 4 and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Because the Biden Administration has abdicated its constitutional compact duties to the states, Texas has every legal justification to protect the sovereignty of our states and our nation.”
Signatories include: Governor Kay Ivey (AL), Governor Mike Dunleavy (AK), Governor Sarah Sanders (AR), Governor Ron DeSantis (FL), Governor Brian Kemp (GA), Governor Brad Little (ID), Governor Eric Holcomb (IN), Governor Kim Reynolds (IA), Governor Jeff Landry (LA), Governor Tate Reeves (MS), Governor Mike Parson (MO), Governor Greg Gianforte (MT), Governor Jim Pillen (NE), Governor Joe Lombardo (NV), Governor Chris Sununu (NH), Governor Doug Burgum (ND), Governor Mike DeWine (OH), Governor Kevin Stitt (OK), Governor Henry McMaster (SC), Governor Kristi Noem (SD), Governor Bill Lee (TN), Governor Spencer Cox (UT), Governor Glenn Youngkin (VA), Governor Jim Justice (WV), and Governor Mark Gordon (WY).
Moreover, documents prove that Biden’s assault on America’s border security was intentional.
As President Joe Biden’s immigration crisis overwhelms the United States and wreaks havoc on the state’s resources, confidential documents suggest the president’s open border policies were intentional.
The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a lawsuit against Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claiming the agency halted the 287(g) program, which assists in the deportation of illegal migrant child rapists, attempted murderers, assailants, carjackers, and other known criminals.
In August 2023, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed that the government ended the program in January 2021— right after Biden entered office. However, the compromised agency gave no reason why the government did that.
The 287(g) program allows local law enforcement agencies to work closely with ICE to capture illegal aliens who have committed crimes. They were then able to turn the migrants over to federal officials for arrest and deportation.
Expenditures on one of the most controversial federal programs aiding the millions of illegal immigrants and refugees from Afghanistan, Cuba, and Haiti have skyrocketed more than $2 billion in two years, according to a new report by a non-profit government spending watchdog.
Spending on the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) jumped from $8.9 billion in 2022 to more than $10.9 billion last year, auditors at OpenTheBooks.org (OTB), the Hinsdale, Illinois-based watchdog, found.
Most of the ORR spending explosion came in grants under ORR’s Refugee and Entrant Assistance program that provides a lengthy list of services to such individuals, including emergency housing assistance, work authorizations, public assistance benefits, medical screening, school enrollment, employment, and mental health referrals, and legal assistance.
Such spending was $33.4 million in 2021, the first year of President Joe Biden’s administration. But it hit $404.5 million the next year and then increased to $616.6 million last year, according to federal data obtained by OTB under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Much of the funding went to seven social service organizations, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops ($66.5 million), the International Rescue Committee ($66.4 million), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services ($66.2 million), Church World Service ($64.9 million), U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants ($64.6 million), HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)($56.4 million), and the Ethiopian Community Development Council ($51.6 million).
Trump says he’ll reverse all this:
NEW: Donald Trump says illegals shouldn't get too comfortable because they will be going home, pledges to work with Abbott and Texas to stop the invasion pic.twitter.com/i9dPyBglaA
1. More Democrats voted for Haley than Republicans.
Much like the morning after a drunken hookup with that salad-phobic dude from the IT department, the sun rose to reveal Darling Nikki’s reality. It turns out that a whopping 70% of Haley’s votes were grudge votes from Democrats according to exit polls.
I’m surprised Haley didn’t dump a bucket of Gatorade over herself Tuesday night as she celebrated another shattering loss. More importantly, either Haley doesn’t know a bunch of patchouli ghoulies voted for her, or she doesn’t care.
According to my calculator, 70% of her 136,461 votes is 95,522. Do the subtraction and Haley received a paltry 40,938 Republican votes compared to Trump’s 172,202. In other words, Trump got well over four times as many Republican votes, and Haley got hammered like Thor for the second time.
And yet Haley still got more votes than Biden…
Things that make you go Hmmm: “U.S., Chinese Researchers Wanted to Engineer Virus Similar to Covid One Year before Pandemic Outbreak, Internal Docs Show.”
In an editorial fit for The Onion or the Babylon Bee, Los Angeles Times’ letters editor Paul Thornton wrote a column this week entitled “If you want to leave, fine. But don’t insult California on the way out.”
The column acknowledges an exodus from the state, but sees the problem as former Californians sharing their experiences about what drove them from the Golden State.
It is like Captain William Bligh asking the mutinous crew of the Bounty for a reference as they head for the lifeboats.
Thornton wrote that “more than 800,000 Californians moved away in 2022, and many thousands more left last year. Often, the departees, cash in hand from the sale of their $1-million bungalows, feel the need to express disdain for their home state, and even some anger too.”
He then begs them to keep mum about their reasons for leaving the state, which commonly range from rising crime to high taxes to runaway spending.
And speaking of the LA Times, 115 staffers were just laid off. Sucks to be you. I would suggest learning some Python, but with so many startups shutting down, it probably wouldn’t help. Instead, maybe they should learn to weld. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.)
“Senate Candidate Says Fraudulent Donation to Speaker Phelan Made in His Name…Jace Yarbrough, an attorney and Air Force veteran, was shown on a recent campaign finance report as having sent a $75 donation to Phelan on December 24, just days after he filed to run for the open Senate District 30 seat. Yarbrough, however, has categorically denied making any donation to Phelan…He also emphasized his role as counsel to State Sen. Angela Paxton (R–McKinney) during the impeachment trial of her husband Attorney General Ken Paxton that was championed by Phelan.”
Islam is on the verge of completely taking over Europe, in all ways—at least according to one who should know, Hans-Georg Maaßen, Germany’s top domestic intelligence chief from 2012 to 2018. In a recent interview, he stressed several points that spell the imminent downfall of Europe to Islam.
His warnings are buttressed by disturbing demographic changes. According to conservative estimates from Pew Research, over the next 25 years—meaning most of the current generation’s lifetime—Europe’s Muslim population will triple to a staggering 76 million. In fact, the actual current and future numbers of Muslims appear to be higher, though there are no official tallies. For example, in an earlier, 2011 study, Pew Research found that “The number of Muslims in Europe has grown from 29.6 million in 1990 to 44.1 million in 2010. Europe’s Muslim population is projected to exceed 58 million by 2030.” Clearly 58 million in five years’ time is more significant than 76 million in 25 years’ time.
Not only is mass migration responsible for Islam’s exponential growth in Europe, but once there, the average Muslim woman has significantly more children than the average European woman. “Muhammad” is taking West Europe by storm as the number one name for newborn baby boys.
During his interview, Hans-Georg Maaßen said that these large numbers are intentional, and the work of Europe’s ruling elite. For this intelligence chief, the “great replacement” theory is no myth. The more ideologically mixed a population is forced into becoming, the less able it is to identify itself, much less protect any beliefs:
[O]ur politicians want a different population. The political left follows the course of the anti-German ideology. The more heterogeneous a population, the less able it is to articulate itself and have a democratic say. The more politics accept immigrants from other countries as they see fit and grants them citizenship, the more politics select the people of the state and influence the election results. These migrants then vote differently than the locals.
Journalist who criticized tennis players Novak Djokovic for not getting the jab dies of suddenly.
B-21 Raider officially enters production. Though the B-21 has contained costs better than some Air Force programs, I believe the days of expensive manned bombers has passed.
Director Norman Jewison dead at 97. He directed more popular and critically acclaimed films, but for me he’ll always be the director of the vastly underrated Rollerball. (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
America’s largest skyscraper will be built in…Oklahoma City? Yeah, can’t see the economic case there.
When Giorgia Meloni of the conservative Brothers of Italy was elected head of Italy’s coalition government, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual Eurolefty sorts and their media cheering corner about how radical, populist, etc. etc. she was. Plus the usual accusations of fascism, due Brothers of Italy having a bit of that DNA from one of the party’s it joined with being the successor party to the successor party of Il Duce. (It’s Italy. You can’t really tell all the twists and turns of party lineage without a dense color-coded flow chart.)
Wait, you can’t tell it with one, either.
But Meloni has generally governed as a fairly stand-issue slightly rightist leader by European standards. But recently she’s been saying and doing things that show she has a bit more starch than the usual Euroweenie leader.
Italy will pull out of China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the government has confirmed.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration notified Beijing that it would cease participating in the BRI ahead of a deadline at the year’s end.
Italy was the only major Western nation to sign up to the BRI, one of China’s most ambitious trade and infrastructure projects, in 2019.
The move was heavily criticised by the US and others at the time.
Launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, the BRI aims to invest an estimated $1tn (£794bn; €925bn) across Asia and Europe. Projects including new and upgraded railways and ports aim to connect China with Europe and other parts of Asia.
Snip.
Only a fraction of the up to €20bn worth of investment in Italy promised by Mr Xi in 2019 has materialised.
Italian exports to China were worth €16.4bn last year, compared to €13bn in 2019.
By contrast, Chinese exports to Italy rose to €57.5bn from €31.7bn over the same period.
The bill benefited China a lot more than Italy. Indeed, Chinese investment in Italy actually dropped after signing the Belt and Road agreement, from $650 million in 2019 to just $33 million in 2021. (I suspect Flu Manchu had a lot to do with that, but, well, that was China’s fault too.)
Giorgia Meloni said, “In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values of our civilization!”
Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni scoffed at Islamic culture and said that there is no place for it in Europe. “I believe that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilization,” she said.
The premier added, “The Islamic cultural centers in Italy are financed by Saudi Arabia where Sharia is in force. In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values of our civilization!
The comments come after the Italian prime minister hosted a political festival organised by her far-right party- the Brothers of Italy- in Rome which was attended by British prime minister Rishi Sunak. In his speech, Rishi Sunak said that he would push for global reforms to the asylum system while warning that the threat of growing number of refugees could “overwhelm” parts of Europe.
A whole lot of people in Europe are thinking the same thing, but few have stated it as bluntly as Meloni, and virtually none among EU country Prime Ministers. (Though Hungary’s Viktor Orban has come closest.)
Despite the Russo-Ukrainian War and the growing recession, unlimited Islamic immigration into traditionally Christian European countries is the hot-button topic European elites have been desperate to avoid talking about, and the one in which governing elite groupthink seems farthest away from the actual will of the people.
Expect it to continue to be a hot topic as long as European leaders continue to ignore the consensus among citizens of EU nations that they don’t want Muslim illegal aliens coming to their country.
